E1: Joshua Baumgarten

TRANSCRIPT
by Miruna

[Evy:] Welcome to Word Up Podcast. I'm Evy
[Webster:] And I'm Webster.
[Evy:] And today we have a guest... called Joshua... Baumgarten!
[Joshua:] Oh, wow. Evy! Wow, that's...
[Webster:] Quite an intro.
[Joshua:] That's quite an intro, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Webster, good morning!
[Joshua:] Yeah, good morning.
[Joshua:] And you on the tech side of things. She's made as a ghost, we're not supposed to pay attention, so...
[laughing]
[Evy:] So, welcome to the podcast...
[Joshua:] Thank you, welcome to the Irrational Library Shop in Haarlem town. Thanks for coming out.
[Evy:] It's a great space, we're excited to be here and to find out everything, all the deep secrets you have for us.
[Joshua:] Deep secrets...
[Evy:] Dark secrets.
[Joshua:] I try to keep my deep secrets in the shallow end of the pool, so...
[laughing]
[Webster:] We're open, we're open.
[Joshua:] Let's share. Trust me, this is not a safe place.
[Evy:] Uuu, I'm intrigued.
[Joshua:] Like I said, this is not a passive-aggressive place, it's an aggressively-passive place.
[Webster:] For our audience listening, would you mind describing your shop? Cause it's really cool in here.
[Joshua:] Sure, we're now sitting in the back of the Irrational Library Shop on the Doelstraat 31 zwart, 31 black in the Haarlem town, in the Vijfhoek. And it's a sort of a second-hand record-book-comic-everything that is cool in life shop, with two barbers, Rob and Clemens, The MadDaddy's. We exist now seven years. And it's... I had once this sort of mantra slogan about the shop, if I remember correctly, it's sort of like, "Try to fill up the shop with the influences and references of yesterday, so the creators of tomorrow know best who to rip off."
[laughing]
[Evy:] Wow.
[Webster:] Nice.
[Joshua:] So, it's a shop full of stuff that... you come and hopefully be engaged by, and then take it and internalize it, and then do your thing with it, so to speak. Yeah. It's a cool shop in Haarlem town.
[Evy:] It's definitely cool, I think that's for sure.
[Evy:] Is this where you write your poetry?
[Joshua:] Um, sometimes, yeah. I come in, in the morning, I sit behind my little desk out front there and I just sort of... The guys are busy doing the beards and giving guys haircuts and I just sort of tune in or tune out. And then I just start writing sometimes, you know, just... yeah. It gives me a lot of time to do that here. But usually I somehow start off in the morning, be it in the shower or in the gym or somewhere, a line will kind of pop into my head and I'll write that one quickly down, and then I'll try to flush it out here.
[Evy:] Yeah, because you used to write these waterproof notes in the shower... was it?
[Joshua:] Oh yeah, the Aquanotes.
[Evy:] The Aquanotes!
[Joshua:] On sale here in the Irrational Library. Yeah that's a fantastic, a wonderful invention, I find. It's a notepad that... their slogan is something like: "No more good thoughts down the drain" or something, so...
[Evy:] Wow, that's so cool.
[Joshua:] The notepad can hang on the wall in the shower, with a pencil and then you just write your shit down while you're under the shower. I mean, there was one point where my entire shower was filled with these random thoughts and stuff, that sometimes would flush themselves out into poems. Yeah.
[Evy:] That's...
[Joshua:] I forgot all about them. Yeah, that's a wonderful invention and I love that stuff.
[Webster:] It seems like you draw inspiration from quite a lot of things. Back to your shop again. I just see, around the walls, you've got some beautiful artwork, some trippy stuff, you've got some poetry of yours as well, is that true?
[Joshua:] What you're pointing at right now are actually setlists. Those are setlists from bands who have played either in the shop or on nights that I promote in the Patronaat or other places.
[Webster:] Right.
[Joshua:] So, I just really find it fun always to stick up these setlists from the bands and it's all these random words and, you know... or titles of things and...
[Webster:] Right.
[Joshua:] But, so. What's the question? What am I inspired by, or?
[laughing]
[Webster:] Yeah.
[Joshua:] The shop is definitely a sort of reaction or explosion of everything that I grew up putting into, inducing into myself, sort of, you know, that I... when I was back living in New York, where I grew up, in the suburbs of New York City... A friend of mine, this guy I grew up with, his name is Michael Slive , when I was 15 or 16, he introduced me to the Sex Pistols. I had found a book about Sid and Nancy and he was like, "Have you ever heard the music?" And I was like... "Oh, there's...? No, no." So he gave me a copy tape of "Never Mind the Bollocks", the first album of the Sex Pistols, and, yeah, that sort of opened a whole world up to me of... you know, there were certain bands I was into before that, like Devo and Oingo Boingo, a bit of kind of quirky, punky stuff, but I didn't really know that there was an extension to it. And the Sex Pistols sort of opened that floodgate to me and he started to take me down to - he was a few years older than I - take me from the suburbs into Greenwich Village, down to the city. And then to all these different poster stores or record shops and bookshops and stuff. And I was just like... [mimics gobbling sound]. You know? Just gobbling stuff up. I think to my parents... to my mom I said: "I'm going to the city, I need some money to buy clothes."
[laughing]
[Joshua:] "Ok, sweetheart, here's the credit card." And I'd come back with all these, you know, Strung Out, Sid Vicious and Sid and Nancy T-shirts and yeah... the bondage bands, you know, and stuff like that... and mom was like "What is this stuff?" But... yeah, it was the punk rock that really expanded my horizons. And taught me a lot of stuff about seeing outside the lines, seeing outside of what... You know, I grew up watching MTV.
[Webster:] Yeah.
[Joshua:] I mean, I remember moments in MTV history, like when Michael Jackson Thriller came out. Coming off the school bus with my sister and running to the house cause at 3 o'clock was the world premiere and we had to... And so, we grew up indulging in pop culture. I went to the mall, I skateboarded, we went to video arcades, then punk rock just, sort of, put me in contact with a lot of the rest of the world, like California and stuff. And also, via that into literature. References from writers that were influenced... or punk rock musicians that were influenced by writers and artists. So, the shop is that. I mean there's stuff actually in the shop... on the side of the fridge there is a poster of Sid Vicious, that is from my bedroom, when I was 16.
[Webster:] No way.
[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean, I collect, and I hold on to stuff. Cause I just, yeah, ... I've changed, but I haven't changed. I've tried to better myself in a way, as I become an adult, but things that I am accustomed to and I love, they stay with me, they stick with me. And I stick with them, that sort of thing. Sorry, I sort of rambled.
[laughing]
[Webster:] It's a good ramble, it's a good ramble.
[Evy:] I just wanted to go back to ask about your poetry. When do you think that you started writing - since we already heard your influences a little bit...?
[Joshua:] I was thinking about that this morning - and other people ask that to me... I have the vague memory of, like, when I was 13 or 14 and my parents had a party at the house for some holiday occasion, so there were a lot of relatives over and something happened that annoyed me, so it pissed me off. So, I remember going in my room and writing an angry piece. And I've never stopped. But then when I was 16 or 17 I was in this punk band in high-school and I was the singer front man and I wrote the texts, so... then I wrote the classic... "sexual operation, my mommy had a pussy, my daddy had a dick, I gave her a blowjob cause she is such a prick", something like that. It was about transgender. It was before its time, I think, transgender...
[Evy:] Yes, setting the trends.
[laughing]
[Joshua:] So, I wrote stuff then. And then, when I was in college, I joined a fraternity and I sort of became a frat boy for a very brief moment. Cause there was just... the punks I ran into in college were really not my type, so... but I met these guys at the fraternity who were all this, sort of, reckless kind of weird dudes, one into Ramones, one into The Grateful Dead, so everybody was their own bag of nuts. So, I was like, "Oh, I fit in with these guys", but after a while it all went sort of bad-shaped, with drugs and alcohol and girls and stuff like that and money. And then I reverted back to books again. And then I started writing. And since then I haven't stopped. It was a way for me to dig myself out of a mental hole. An emotional sort of like... yeah. I was not in a really, so to speak, good place, with a lot of it... So, that was a way for my therapy... to write a lot, and then I sort of... yeah, strange enough for you, a Red Hot Chili Peppers song from one of their last good albums, "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", where Anthony Kiedis rhymes "I sit on the porch cause I forgot my house key, I pick up a book and I read Bukowski". Something like that. And I was like, who's...? What? Bukowski. And then - I was a huge Pepper fan back then, like I said before, they turned to shit - and then I was in... San Francisco, I think it was... where... nah, it was back... yeah, I was on a road trip with friends from college, and we were in the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco... and I saw a book by Bukowski. And I was like, oh! Is this the guy they're talking about? So, I bought it and it just... Yeah, it was the first poet I really was able to get, because he wasn't trying to hide behind a lot of illusions or metaphors, or overly pretty language or stuff, it was just like down and dirty, sort of like rough language and that I sort of... I was like, "Oh, ok, I get this." And I sort of really started to... Back when I was in New York, in Albany, where I went to school, there was a bookseller there named John Nelson, Nelson's bookstore, and he had a personal connection with John Martin, who was from Black Sparrow Press, who had published all of Bukowski's work. So, I used to go to this bookstore a lot and talk with this old man about the books and buy and buy and collect and collect.
[Webster:] Wow.
[Joshua:] And Bukowski, what is... you love him, or you don't. It's fine. But what I really liked about him is, in a lot of his poems he writes about other authors, about how they lived, about how they went insane, how they created, whatever. And for me that was sort of... I started tracing these writers. And figured out who they were. And that was how I started learning about a stream of literature that I wasn't getting in college. In college I was getting, really, more or less... you know, what they prescribed you. "This is what you've got to read, dude." And then, via Bukowski, this list. I was like, wow.
[Evy:] It's more underground and more un...
[Joshua:] No, you know... Underground? I don't know. I mean it was like John Fonte, William Saroyan, all the way back to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Villon, Rabelais, Garcia Lorca... you know?
[Evy:] Oh, ok.
[Joshua:] It was people, writers from around the world... and just very engaging. So, stuff like that really influenced me. So, yeah, back to your question - again rambling - when I was in college, that's really when it's really set the tone for me. And I haven't stopped writing since then.
[Evy:] So, I'm really curious now to hear your poem that you have for us.
[Joshua:] Yeah, you said it has to be a short one, but... yeah... I like... this one's got a bit more me down there. It may be coming out, I have a new book in the works... It should be coming out sometime in the spring, and I think this one's in it, I'm not quite sure. This one's called

Leave it all as it should be, not as you think they might like it to be.

Leave the dictators to their piles of dirty dishes
the facists to their fascination with fractions
and the conservatives to their unhealthy concern for Kabbalah.
Leave the liberals to their lizard skin collections
the professional athletes to their contemplation of their own lifespans
and the orphans around the world to their opinions about prophylactics.
Leave the garbagemen to their cherry picking
the politicians to their arguements with their own spouses
and the Hollywood elite to their ever increasing lactose intolerance.
Leave the poets to their literary rubiks cube pastimes
the songwriters to picking peanut shells from between their teeth
and the exotic dancers to paying back past taxes.
Leave the junkies to their double dutch jump rope through a protein helix
the professional bowlers to their Saturday night Budweiser blue balls
and the weekend warrior badminton players to their uncircumcised shuttlecocks.
Leave the high school teachers to their stock investments in Kevlar
the lunch ladies to their frozen pizza perservative Fridays
and the school bus drivers to resisting every impulse to drive off a cliff.
Leave the Mexican day laborers to their salted margarita day dreams
the Orthodox Rabbis to their all you can eat kosher buffet at the Crab Cake Factory
and the Mormons to their insecurity when it comes to eating Swedish meatballs.
Leave the neo-nazis to their needle point swastika quilt crocheting
the Muslim Brotherhood to their bowtie community controlled chaos
and the Hari Krishna’s to their hopscotch game through a hostile universe.
Leave the punk rockers to their safety pin conformity safety net
the hip hop heads to their 8 point Scrabble word score for the N-word
and the country music fans to the chewing gum stuck under the seats at the Grand Ole Opry.
Leave the barbers to deal with the insecure vanity of all the manboys with beards
the tattoo artists to all the misinterpretations of life that a person can persuade into their own skin
and the piercers to all the loopholes in life that may help another get over their hang-ups.
Leave the storytellers to their fabled lives of imaginary nobility
the acoustic guitar slinging troubadors to all their songs strung out on cat gut
and the burlesque dancers to all their bellybuttons filled with boa feathers dust.
Leave the newscasters to their muppet like open and shut mouths
the journalists to their ever increasing fear of being murdered,
their graves labeled fake news
and the talk show hosts, to the horrors of polite silence after midnight.
Leave the shopkeepers to ponder what do with all their extra stock
the cafe owners to all the empty tables waiting to occupied by cockroaches
and the fast food franchises to their pockets full of cash smeared in human fat.
Leave the Gods to their congregations buttoned up with fear
the choirs with their vocal chords strung like nooses around their necks
and the atheisists to believing that they have the answers.
Leave the universe alone to manifest its own mayhem
Leave the distant planets as unhabited as they currently are
and please just leave the future of humanity
a whisper of peace and grant them success
with sorting out all of the mess
that all of us have up until now
done our best to scramble into
tiny little pieces
of asbest.



[Webster:] Wonderful.
[Joshua:] Thank you.
[Evy:] I want to clap.
[Webster:] We can clap.
[Evy:] Thank you for sharing that, I... the first poem I heard that I remember was... "Build a mosque"?
[Joshua:] Yeah, Build a mosque, yeah, that's a classic.
[Evy:] I love that one. But you're very experienced on a stage, right?
[Joshua:] Yeah, again, I believe it was around college time that I started going to poetry readings and performing. And then I was... when I lived in LA, I didn't do it so much because I didn't really... I worked a lot and then when I went, I didn't really feel comfortable in the atmosphere there, I didn't feel like I was making a connection with people. Then there was the year before I moved to Holland, when I lived back with my parents in the suburbs of Manhattan, and I would go into the city and I met a cool bunch of people, who did something they called Mind Guerilla. And I would go to those readings. And those were fun, cause the guys who ran them tried to make them fun, they brought like noise makers, instead of clapping, you'd make noise and stuff, and it was really a mixed bag of weirdos. And then I started performing. And poetry readings are tough, I mean, sometimes... I remember once in New York City, at a bar, you waited three hours for five minutes. Then someone gets up with like, you know, a stack of papers. "And the myth of the galylyth of zaggathoris means that..." Whoa, what are you talking about, dude? Ok. But yeah. And, then, when I got here, living in Holland, it's been on and off, in the last few years a bit more on... And it depends on the atmosphere of the event...
[Evy:] But do you still feel jitterish, do you still feel nervous on the stage?
[Joshua:] No. No, I... there's always a nervous energy, and sometimes while I'm reading my hand shakes, but that's some sort of weird sort of palsy. It's like, I'm not nervous because I've done it enough that I don't have to be nervous, that I'm confident enough that I'm going to choose how to write poems that are connecting or try to connect with people and see what people take from it. I see people performing without paper and they get it all out of their head, and I'm like, wow, that's so cool, it's great. But that to me doesn't really work, because that means you got to put in a lot of time to remember it.
[Webster:] Practice.
[Joshua:] I'm way too lazy for that. And I sometimes feel it becomes a bit acting, like you're just reciting lines.
[Evy:] Yeah.
[Joshua:] I'm not saying that people are. But I have this thing about the page. When I see old films of poets performing with their book, you know, that's what... And that's why, when I perform with the band, I have the music stand and all my texts there.
[Evy:] And I love how you throw the paper on the floor all the time. Like it's really...
[Joshua:] At the last show, at the end, I kicked this music stand into the crowd. I just... pow. People were like...
[Evy:] Nobody got hurt, right?
[Joshua:] No one got hurt. Afterwards I thought it was kind of lame...
[Webster:] It's 3D poetry.
[laughing]
[Joshua:] A guitarist can smash his guitar, what can I do? Throw my page in. Or, I have this thing, I throw my microphone down. And then... I smashed the like... the grill of it. I had to buy new ones, cause I'm so... It's, really, pretty sad.
[Evy:] What's the weirdest thing... or what's the most interesting thing that happened on stage over the years?
[Joshua:] Oh? I wish there was a good story about that. I don't really... I don't know. Oh, well, it had nothing to do with poetry, but it does have something to do with poetry. It has to do with the time that Patti Smith called me an asshole.
[Webster:] That's always good.
[Joshua:] I'll try to make a long story short. I was working as a host at Down the Rabbit Hole Festival, the second year, and I was hosting the second stage there, and I asked to host this stage because Patti Smith was performing. And I'd never been a huge Patti Smith fan, but [I have] respect for her work, the people she's worked with, the fact that she's still doing it and she still does what she does. Power, you know. No doubt. So, I asked to host this stage and I knew the people running the festival, I'd worked there before, I'd worked for Lowlands hosting stuff, so they were like, "Yeah, sure, great, cool". So, the first day of the festival, we have a meeting and they explain to us, of course, you know, as a host, yeah, you make contact with the artist, the manager, so you let them know who you are and what you do, if that's what they want, if they want it or not, you know? And I'm like, I've been hosting stuff for a long time, so I know how it goes. It's cool, no problem. So, the whole day I'm waiting to see Patti Smith. I met with other bands and some performers really loved what I did, and others were, "No, we don't really want that" - "Ok, fine". You know? And I'd built up this whole intro about Patti Smith as the godmother of punk rock, of being influenced by the French romantics, and this whole sort of thing, you know, to really tell the people in the audience - who might not really know who they're dealing with - this is what you're going to get. So, finally, it gets towards show time and the whole hustle and bustle and I see my stage manager and I say, "Bart, have you met anybody from her crew yet?" And he's like, "Yeah, that guy over there, that's her manager". And I see this guy, this little dude, big black cowboy hat on, you know, shirt and black vest, open with the hair coming out and stuff like that, he looks like an elfin cowboy or something... [laughing] And he's like... what was his name again, shit... I forget his exact name. But he says, "Yeah, that's Eddie" - "Ok, cool". So, I'm sort of like, a bit nervous, you know, but I'm thinking ok, so... I see the guy barking orders at people, and he's walking towards me and I sort of like go, "Hey!", I sort of just jump in front of him, and go, "Hi, excuse me, you're Eddie, right?". He goes, "No, man, it's not Eddie, it's Edward!" - I forget exactly what his name was, but it was like I called him... and he was like, "No, it's Edward!"... I go, "Ok, hey, Edward, my name's Joshua, I'm the host of this stage, I'm going to be introducing Patti Smith in a little bit..." - "No, there is no introduction, it's just a walk-on", and he just walks right past me. And I'm like... Oh, fuck. All right, fine, that's ok. Sucks, but that's the way it goes. And you don't have to be a dick, but... But so it goes, so there's no introduction. So, I watched the show on the side of the stage, by the main tech panel, whatever you call it, you know, front house panel, or whatever. It was a brilliant show. I mean, she's 61, you know, playing all the classics, and she does these songs with all the shout-outs, the olds, like William Burroughs, and the crowd's like "Woooo!" and then she did Kurt Cobain, and everybody goes "Yeahhh!" and Jim Carroll, and everybody's like "Who?" [laughing] And she's like, it's Jim Carroll, man, that's the New York big... So, show's wrapping up, and she's pulling the guitar strings off - I think they did My Generation at the end - she's pulling the guitar strings off and show ends, crowd goes... [imitates crowd cheering]... and they're walking off on the other side of the stage, so I come from the other side of the stage and I grab the mike and I'm like, "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... Down the Rabbit Hole, let me hear it for the one and only godmother of punk rock, Patti Smith", [imitates crowd cheering]... and you know, I say a few other things about her and then I round it off with you know, "in the immortal words of French romantic poet Charles Baudelaire, who said that you have to go out and get drunk, get drunk off of life, drunk on the wine, drunk off the good times, go out there tonight ladies and gentlemen and get drunk on life and Down the Rabbit Hole, go out there and fuck like rabbits". Something like that, so I'm like punk rock crazy, fuck, and I also said we should know where we were at this moment, because we witnessed a legend perform here tonight. It's all I was saying. Incredible... [imitates crowd cheering] ... So, I walk off the stage, I walk behind the stage and then from the behind the stage, I see down there, I see Eddie screaming at Bart, the stage manager. Now, Eddie's a dwarf. Well not a dwarf, he's just a short little midget...
[Webster:] Small man...
[Joshua:] Small man. And Bart is tall, big Dutch guy, and he's... finger waving up and stuff, and I'm like, wooo... that doesn't look very good, I'm just going to walk the long way around. So, I go the long way around to the back stage and I grab a beer and sit down, and Bart comes down and he goes, "Dude, they're pissed". And I'm like, "Who's pissed?" He's like "Patti Smith, man, she called you an asshole". And I'm like, "What?" He's like, "Yeah". I'm like, "What happened?" He's like "She walked offstage, and she heard... She sat down in a chair and this guy Eddie was putting on her shoes... cause her shoes were off. And she hears what I say, and she says what... I go out there and bust my ass for an hour working and this asshole goes on stage and says that?"
[Webster:] You impressed her.
[Joshua:] And I'm like "What?" So, then there was this ripple effect of, like, she's pissed, so her manager's pissed, manager's pissed, manager calls bookie agency, bookie agency's pissed and calls direction of the festival. Direction of the festival's pissed so he calls the guy who booked me, who's running the festival, and he's pissed. So there's this ripple effect and I didn't even really know what was going on until the next day, when they came and found me and, like, this guy who had hired me to do the job, who I knew from Haarlem, from Patronaat, he says, he asked me what was going on I said, "Well, great first day, but I guess you heard". And he's "Yeah, we almost had to fire you last night". And I'm like "Why?". He's like, "Well they told you there was no intro and no outro, and you just went and did it". And I was like "Waaait a second, let's rewind this. Who told you that?" And he's like, "This guy, the manager, Eddie told you that there was no intro and no outro". I said, "Now we can stop, because this asshole told me that there was no intro and said nothing about an outro".
[Webster:] Oh, jeez.
[Joshua:] And if it's in the contract that you guys signed with her, you fucked me. I didn't fuck you, I do what I'm told to do. I know what I'm doing. You know? I take the job seriously... And they're like, "Well yeah, all the people are saying, you're too busy on the stage, you're too invasive", and I'm like, "Oh fuck off"... So that's why I don't work for Mojo anymore.
[Webster:] Oh, jeez.
[Joshua:] And I hope not to, because I think they're a bullshit company putting on bullshit festivals.
[Webster:] Put it out there.
[Joshua:] No, I do, I think they book the big bands and they look so glorious and stuff but it's so tight-assed.
[Webster:] I think you have to be nice to people, you know, when you're working creatively.
[Joshua:] I don't think they understand what I do, and I think that has a lot to do with how I am as a person and it's just more honest than maybe most, I don't know. But anyway, that was a weird story. It's a long story, but that was the weirdest, probably, thing that happened to me on stage. That one of your heroes can, all of a sudden, call you an asshole for, like, just trying to inflate...
[Webster:] To elevate them...
[Joshua:] Make them look good. And now every time her music comes on, I have to turn it off or … she played at Paradiso sometime, sometimes people are like, "So, are you going to go, are you going to call, are you going to do this, are you going to do that?" I'm like, no, I'm not going to go, I'm not going to... I do wish maybe one day I'm on a festival of some type, to do what I do, with the band or alone and she's there as well for some reason, I could sit her down, and be like Patti, there seems to be a misunderstanding between us, you once called me an asshole and she'll be like, "Who are you?"
[Evy:] The asshole.
[Joshua:] "You, oh, you! You're no asshole, you're a dick!" Well, yes, that's true, but...
[Webster:] On the flip side of that, you keep coming back on stage. So, what positive vibes are you getting that make you keep performing? Even when people do call you an asshole?
[Joshua:] That was one time and it was such a rare thing. And, like I said, about working for a major company, doing major festivals, I'm glad I had the opportunity to do it, so I've thanked them for hiring me, for that, but I've noticed that it just doesn't work. Where, here, I do hosting for Haarlem's Bevrijdingspop - which is, again, a big festival - I'm like, "You guys know how I am on stage, right?" Before they hire me. And they're like "Yeah, but that's what we want". So, ok, fine. So, yeah, I go out there and I do my thing, and I curse, I do what I do but I try to engage the people, you know? It's like, as a host you bring the audience and the band closer together. And then you step away.
[Webster:] Yeah.
[Joshua:] So that sometimes takes a bit of work. You know, you have hosts go like "Alright thanks man [indiscernible mumbling]" and they walk away. I think, why are you there in the first place? If you're not there to engage the crowd, pull them closer, taunt them even, you know, work them up, and then feed the band, and vice-versa. It's fun, but I also... and in performing... I don't like being in the crowd anymore. I like having something to do, I like being useful. I worked at a club a number of years ago, a sort of underground artist community thing called the De Fietsznfabriek, here in Haarlem, and this girl once said to me, she says, "You know, you only like it when you feel needed or necessary". And I was like, yeah, duh. Isn't that part of what we are as humans in a community, that you should feel - want to feel - that you're needed by other people to take part in things, to contribute?
[Evy:] To connect.
[Joshua:] To connect, yeah. So, to me, being able to either perform or host or be on that stage is a way for me to connect or help other people to connect, by the things I say or just the presence of being there. And then I've gone... I've just grown into that. So being just a passive observer sometimes just doesn't really work for me that much anymore. And yeah, being on stage is sort of, you get to rock out, you get to do your thing, you get to put your creative juices out there and it's fun, it's... you get invited to go places and meet new people, you maybe get a free meal and a few free drinks, but you get to come in contact with people.
[Webster:] Yeah, I mean I could definitely attest, I think we all can, when we've seen you on stage, you have this very unique energy that gets people engaged from the moment you step on, we're paying attention and you've got this sort of really rustic kind of like grungy voice and it's super deep and, you know, people love listening to you, you've got really high energy. And when you do deliver, your words mean a lot. We can tell that you've chosen very specific wording to tell your story and you're not just a mouthpiece saying something that you feel about. So, yeah.
[Joshua:] Yeah, thank you. It's, well, I feel that there's a responsibility, also, when you get on stage. And there were points when I was younger when I was a lot more nonchalant about it, you know, I thought, I'll drink seven beers before I go onstage and it's all fine, you know. Going through that sort of Bukowski sort of idea. And then I sort of grew up.. and I grew out of my influences. They're still there and they've helped me along the way, they got me to where I am today. But now I feel like now I'm flying on my own, I can do this and it's all the things I've internalized and flushed out of me that, you know... My biggest influences are not, per se, from poets, but stand-up comedians, guys like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Bill Hicks and Richard Prior, early Eddie Murphy, even a lot of newer guys like you know - that's one thing I love about Netflix is you get all these stand-up comedians and you can just ... [makes gobbling sound].
[Webster:] Take it all in.
[Joshua:] Yeah, and there's this thing on YouTube called Frankenstein's lab and it's these two black guys sitting there, really casual in a room and they'll show a small clip of a comedian. And you, just watching them, sort of react to this, laughing, and afterwards they'll make a few comments about it, but they don't try to dissect it, it's like, I'm not really sure what the point of it is, but I find it's almost like sitting in a room with two guys you're getting along with and laughing at the same shit. And they usually really pull out stuff that has to do with race, or, you know, ethnicity or stuff like that, which is very touchy in America nowadays, and I find it really engaging to see how people react to that in a very sober - or maybe they're even really stoned, I don't know - but it's like, intelligent way, without getting the pants... without getting like "Oh, my God..."
[Webster:] "Oh my God, he said this"...
[Joshua:] And that's the scary thing in America. Yeah, the stand-up comedians... because I find... I tried stand-up comedy a number of years ago for like six months. Someone told me I was funny.
[Webster:] That's good.
[Joshua:] So, I thought I'll do it. But it is so difficult to make people laugh. Because they sit there so judgmental, you know. And then you've got to really... timing is intrinsic... so there are so many more different things to doing stand-up comedy than, say, spoken word poetry. And then for me, I'm able to incorporate my own sense of humor into my text, and also the way I bring it up across on the stage, so... yeah, it's... I've created for myself a sort of crossover effect.
[Evy:] I always feel like we can talk forever with you.
[Joshua:] It's because I ramble. I like talking.
[Webster:] I enjoy it.
[Evy:] However, it's almost time to wrap up, I just have one last question.
[Joshua:] I'll make this last, then... [laughing]
[Evy:] From all the experience and good advice you got, what is the advice you would like to pass on to people who may be starting writing or performing or doubting about it, what's the best thing that you can give... what's your word of wisdom?
[Joshua:] Um. Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, I... in that sense, sometimes I fall back on what Bukowski has on his gravestone. Which I always think is very cool, it says, "Don't try." And then people sometimes get a bit thrown off by that, they go, "What do you mean, don't try? Course you got to try, if you don't try, you're not going to"... But yeah, that's not what he meant, of course, you know, it's: do it, don't try, just do it. And that makes sense to me, you know, it's... and that's what I've incorporated into my own life. I'm like... is this who you want to be? Then be it. Is this what you want to do? Then do it. Don't go half-assing to it. I mean, we all have our days when we feel half-assed and lazy about whatever we do with our lives, it's part of life, but you know, I'm very fortunate with my life, I'm very grateful for the situation I have with my family, my wife, my friends and all this stuff and a lot of people have helped me to do this, but I know I couldn't do it unless something got me out of bed every morning and said, "Do this". Sit down, write it, you know, have a little bit of faith in yourself or be self-critical, don't be afraid to look at yourself in the mirror and just be honest with yourself and that just sort of helps people get along the creative process. If I look back to things I wrote when I was in my 20s, I guess it's like, "Oh fuck". Yeah. But then I understand now where I am with it all and the idea of also growing as a person and trying to evolve as a person and evolve with your understanding of how to deal with other people, yeah... My sister once said to me, years ago she said to me that I was very selfish. I'm the younger sibling so of course... [laughing] But I said, look, if I don't spend this time now trying to figure out how to deal with myself, then I'll never know how to deal with other people. And that was, I felt, a very valid statement for myself. Because I needed that. I needed to funnel, channel into myself what the hell was going on with myself or the world to be able to deal with it. And what's also helped was for me to live here in Europe. Because here I feel like much more of a world citizen than if I was in the States, there I feel like I'm just part of this thing I grew up in and having to break out of that or push those walls away is a lot more difficult. You know I think when you move from somewhere else in the world and you end up here, especially a place like Holland, close to the big city, in a nice city, you know, you have that, you can sort of push the walls far enough away from you that they don't come in down on you and they come in contact with people from around the world. And that really broadened my mind and my sense of being like, wow. And hearing stories from other people from around the world and what they've been through and where their experiences are and, yeah... The coolest thing is via the writing... I know this guy, a filmmaker in South Africa. And that's like... still every time we have contact, I'm always really tickled by that. I think... we've never have met each other, but we call each other brother. We have this, somehow, connection with one another. And respect for one another. And I hope, yeah, one day, to get down to South Africa. To meet each other. It would be kind of cool. Sorry, again, rambling. But as far as words of wisdom go, just do what you feel is good and don't... Listen to what other people have to say to you, and if you trust them, take what they have to say to your heart, and then let it go. Don't carry it with you. There are things I can remember that people said to me years ago that I still carry with me and I think, why am I still carrying this bullshit with me? Just be true to... Yeah, at the end of the day you only got one person to deal with really, and that's yourself, so be true to yourself and keep it up and try to put out something that's going to contribute to, maybe, a better understanding of who we are and who you are, leave it at that.
[Webster:] Sounds great.
[Evy:] Great advice, thank you very much.
[Joshua:] You're welcome, thank you guys for coming out on this snowy Sunday.
[Webster:] So, Josh, where can we find you?
[Joshua:] For that gratuitous self-promotion moment of the show, Webster, Facebook, yeah, we have The Irrational Library Headquarters, it's the shop, I've a page, Joshua Baumgarten "The Poetry of Modern Urban Hope", it's sort of my Facebook page for writings, I also have a blog under that same name. The band The Irrational Library, also on Facebook, and also on Spotify and Bandcamp with the album "Now that we still can", and I think that sort of covers the basis of where you can find me at. The shop has... we have a website that's a work in progress, it'll be back online I think in a week or two, that's irrationallibrary.nl. So... yeah, we're out there, if you want to find us. It's not too difficult.
[Webster:] Thanks.
[Joshua:] Thank you.
[Webster:] Well, thank you guys for listening, this has been the Word Up Podcast and, as usual, you can find information about us on www.worduppodcast.com, where you can also find some very useful information about our guests. Thank you.
[Evy:] Thank you, Joshua.
[Joshua:] You're welcome, have a fine day, thanks for listening, folks.
[Evy:] Doei!